Climate History

The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, equal in size to China or the United States. Yet, this arid expanse was once a verdant, pleasant land, fed by rivers and lakes. The Sahara sustained abundant plant and animal life, such as Nile perch, turtles, crocodiles, and hippos, and attracted prehistoric hunters and herders. What transformed this land of lakes into a sea of sands?

In April 1970, twenty million people grabbed their rakes, gloves, and recycling bins to celebrate the first Earth Day. Since that environmental kickoff, nature has never been in better shape. RIGHT? WRONG! The real deal is a bit muddier than that. It’s true that the first Earth Day encouraged people around the globe to clean up their act when it came to the environment. But activists have been working for centuries to save the planet! Join the History Smashers team to bust history's biggest misconceptions and figure out what really went down before (and after!) the first Earth Day.

At least thirteen million Americans will have to move away from American coasts in the coming decades, as rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms put lives at risk and cause billions of dollars in damages. In Charleston, South Carolina, denial, boosterism, widespread development, and public complacency about racial issues compound; the city, like our country, has no plan to protect its most vulnerable. Susan Crawford tells the story of a city that has played a central role in America's painful racial history for centuries and now stands at the intersection of climate and race.

Read by the author, Tom Lathan. In Lost Wonders author and journalist Tom Lathan tells the powerful stories of ten species that have lived, died out and been declared extinct since the turn of the twenty-first century. Many scientists believe that we are currently living through the Earth’s...

In lucid and energised prose, Emily Mayhew summons the four horsemen of the apocalypse; the collective threat to humanity bearing the names of war, pestilence, famine and death. As they began in Revelations and have remained in human consciousness ever since, spanning time and space and evolving as new scientific discoveries and advancements in technology alter the world.

For fans of Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, and Jared Diamond: A bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future This program is read by the author. Progress is power. Narratives of progress, the stories we tell about whether a...

An awe-inspiring investigation into the hidden world of the deep sea—the most mysterious, unforgiving environment on Earth—whose secrets can radically revise our understanding of life itself and chart our planetary future. The deep sea is our planet’s last frontier. For most of human...

Haben Sie das Gefühl, die Welt sei aus den Fugen geraten? Sie sind nicht allein - die meisten Menschen haben in den letzten Jahren einen Realitätsschock erlitten: Unser Bild der Welt hat sich oft als kollektive Illusion entpuppt. Wer hätte damit gerechnet, dass Trump die Wahl gewinnt und die Briten für den Brexit stimmen? Dass Hunderttausende nach Europa flüchten und dabei Zehntausende sterben? Dass so viele Demokratien nach rechts kippen? Dass der Klimawandel so schnell spürbar wird und über Nacht eine weltweite Klima-Jugendbewegung entsteht.

Haben Sie das Gefühl, die Welt sei aus den Fugen geraten? Sie sind nicht allein - die meisten Menschen haben in den letzten Jahren einen Realitätsschock erlitten: Unser Bild der Welt hat sich oft als kollektive Illusion entpuppt. Wer hätte damit gerechnet, dass Trump die Wahl gewinnt und die Briten für den Brexit stimmen? Dass Hunderttausende nach Europa flüchten und dabei Zehntausende sterben? Dass so viele Demokratien nach rechts kippen? Dass der Klimawandel so schnell spürbar wird und über Nacht eine weltweite Klima-Jugendbewegung entsteht.

Whether you are flogging tobacco, dealing in oil, pushing pharmaceuticals, denying climate change, or exploiting workers, The Playbook is here to help you obfuscate your way to what you want.

Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political.

Winner of the 2022 Nib Literary Awards. Chosen as a 2021 ‘Book of the Year’ in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Book Review. The celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly...

From the glaciers of the Alps to the towering cumulonimbus clouds of the Caribbean and the unexpectedly chaotic flows of the North Atlantic, Waters of the World is a tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space. A prerequisite for the discovery of global warming and climate change, this idea was forged by scientists studying water in its myriad forms. This is their story.

Insulting the president is an American tradition. From Washington to Trump, presidents have been called "lazy," "feeble," "pusillanimous," and more. Our leaders have been derided as "ignoramuses," "idiots," "morons," and "fatheads," and have been compared to all manner of animals - worms and whales and hyenas, sad jellyfish, strutting crows, lap dogs, reptiles, and monkeys. Political insults tell us what we value in our leaders by showing how we devalue them. In Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels, linguist Edwin Battistella collects over 500 insults aimed at American presidents.

In this Very Short Introduction, Paul B. Wignall looks at the causes and nature of extinctions, past and present, and the factors that can make a species vulnerable. Summarizing what we know about all of the major and minor extinction events, he examines some of the greatest debates in modern science, such as the relative role of climate and humans in the death of the Pleistocene megafauna, including mammoths and giant ground sloths, and the roles that global warming, ocean acidification, and deforestation are playing in present-day extinctions.

En su trabajo más ambicioso hasta la fecha, Thomas L. Friedman muestra los movimientos tectónicos que demuestran que hemos entrado en una era de aceleración vertiginosa - y explica cómo vivir en ella. Tres son las fuerzas aceleradoras que están cambiando nuestro planeta: la ley de Moore (tecnología), el mercado (globalización) y la madre naturaleza (cambio climático y biodiversidad). Estos aceleradores están cambiando cinco reinos clave: el lugar de trabajo, la política, la geopolítica, la ética, y la comunidad.

En su trabajo más ambicioso hasta la fecha, Thomas L. Friedman muestra los movimientos tectónicos que demuestran que hemos entrado en una era de aceleración vertiginosa - y explica cómo vivir en ella. Gracias a los últimos avances tecnológicos, los alpinistas del Everest disfrutan de excelente servicio de telefonía móvil y los automóviles que se conducen solos ya están en nuestras carreteras. Mientras tanto, la Madre Naturaleza también está experimentando cambios dramáticos a medida que los niveles de carbono se elevan y las especies se extinguen.

Climate change is the world’s biggest problem. It affects every human being on Earth, and it’s going to fundamentally alter every human institution and way of life, from business and economics to politics to spirituality, religion, culture, and identity. But, as big as it is, climate change is not “the end of history.” In fact, it’s just the beginning of a new phase of the history of humanity, one that presents opportunities as well as challenges. Being ready to ride this wave of change is the true calling of our times.

Ob Landwirtschaft, Handel, Verkehr oder Urbanisierung: Seit es uns Menschen gibt, haben wir die Erde geprägt und verändert. Insbesondere seit der Industrialisierung hinterlassen wir einen unverwechselbaren und größtenteils unwiderruflichen Fingerabdruck auf der Erde. Inzwischen ist dieser Abdruck so stark, dass Wissenschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft diskutieren, ob sich die vom Menschen verursachten Veränderungen in geologischer Form niederschlagen und so langfristig sind, dass wir bereits in einem neuen Erdzeitalter leben – dem Anthropozän.

In atemberaubendem Tempo haben die Menschen den Planeten ihren Bedürfnissen unterworfen. Im 21. Jahrhundert stehen sie vor den Scherben ihres Tuns: Die natürlichen Ressourcen erschöpft, die Klimaerwärmung eine tödliche Bedrohung, globale Pandemien eine akute Gefahr. Werden wir auch diese Krise meistern? Die Bestsellerautoren Johannes Krause und Thomas Trappe zeigen, was wir aus der Vergangenheit für unser Überleben lernen können - und welche Gefahren in der zügellosen Kraft des Menschen liegen.